Shakespeare’s House, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1854. Henry Wallis

Henry Wallis, Chatterton

Chatterton is Wallis’s earliest and most famous work. The picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, accompanied by the following quotation from Marlowe:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.

Ruskin described the work in his Academy Notes as ‘faultless and wonderful’.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) was an 18^th Century poet, a Romantic figure whose melancholy temperament and early suicide captured the imagination of numerous artists and writers. He is best known for a collection of poems, written in the name of Thomas Rowley, a 15^th Century monk, which he copied onto parchment and passed off as mediaeval manuscripts. Having abandoned his first job working in a scrivener’s office he struggled to earn a living as a poet. In June 1770 he moved to an attic room at 39 Brooke Street, where he lived on the verge of starvation until, in August of that year, at the age of only seventeen, he poisoned himself with arsenic. Condemned in his lifetime as a forger by influential figures such as the writer Horace Walpole (1717-97), he was later elevated to the status of tragic hero by the French poet Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863).

Wallis may have intended the picture as a criticism of society’s treatment of artists, since his next picture of note, The Stonebreaker (1858, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery), is one of the most forceful examples of social realism in Pre-Raphaelite art. The painting alludes to the idea of the artist as a martyr of society through the Christ-like pose and the torn sheets of poetry on the floor. The pale light of dawn shines through the casement window, illuminating the poet’s serene features and livid flesh. The harsh lighting, vibrant colours and lifeless hand and arm increase the emotional impact of the scene. A phial of poison on the floor indicates the method of suicide. Following the Pre-Raphaelite credo of truth to nature, Wallis has attempted to recreate the same attic room in Gray’s Inn where Chatterton had killed himself. The model for the figure was the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), then aged about 28. Two years later Wallis eloped with Meredith’s wife, a daughter of the novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866).

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wallis-chatterton-n01685/text-summary 

Elaine Henry Wallis

The Death of Chatterton - Henry Wallis

Mary Ellen Meredithn

c. 1856

Pencil on paper

7 1/2 x 6 inches

Mary Ellen Meredith, a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, was the widow of Edward Nicoll, captain of the HMS Dwarf, who died in 1844 while trying to rescue a drowning man in the Shanon Estuary in Ireland. According to Nicholas A. Joukovsky, who has recently (2004) published Anne Ramdsden Bennett's reminiscences of her friend, she left George Meredith for Wallis after she discovered that Meredith he had lied to her about his having a distinguished ancestry — something quite significant in understanding the novelist's later development: As Joukovsky points out, "Meredith's sense of shame over his family origins has always seemed excessive, even after making sue allowance for the proverbial contempt in which tailors were traditionally held in British society. But if the brerakdown of his first marriage could actually be traced to a failed attempt to mislead Mary Ellen about his ancestry, then his preoccupation with social class and social climbing takes on on a much more personal dimension" (15).

References

Joukovsky, Nicholas A. "According to Mrs. Bennet: A Document sheds a new and kinder light on George Meredith's first wife." Times Literary Supplement (8 October 2004): 13-15.

Henry Wallis - Mary Ellen Meredithn

c. 1856

Pencil on paper

7 1/2 x 6 inches

Mary Ellen Meredith, a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, was the widow of Edward Nicoll, captain of the HMS Dwarf, who died in 1844 while trying to rescue a drowning man in the Shanon Estuary in Ireland. According to Nicholas A. Joukovsky, who has recently (2004) published Anne Ramdsden Bennett's reminiscences of her friend, she left George Meredith for Wallis after she discovered that Meredith he had lied to her about his having a distinguished ancestry — something quite significant in understanding the novelist's later development: As Joukovsky points out, "Meredith's sense of shame over his family origins has always seemed excessive, even after making sue allowance for the proverbial contempt in which tailors were traditionally held in British society. But if the brerakdown of his first marriage could actually be traced to a failed attempt to mislead Mary Ellen about his ancestry, then his preoccupation with social class and social climbing takes on on a much more personal dimension" (15).

References

Joukovsky, Nicholas A. "According to Mrs. Bennet: A Document sheds a new and kinder light on George Meredith's first wife." Times Literary Supplement (8 October 2004): 13-15.

A Young Girl Arranging a Bouquet - Henry Wallis

Henry Wallis - Study of a Girl Sitting in a Chair circa 1855

Crayon on paper
Tate

Death of Chatterton
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=15906&tabview=text&texttype=10

Henry Wallis - Death of Chatterton 1856

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wallis

Henry Wallis - A Despatch from Trezibond

1873

Showing a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

The background was painted from his travels in Venice.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=578&page=1

Henry Wallis -

[A Young Girl Arranging A Bouquet]

oil on panel

Wallis' method of painting, especially in the early years of his career, and in particular on "Death of Chatterton", was to do the initial sketch, saturate it in water, use a grey tint to block in the shade, put on the colour and allow it to dry. When firm, he would use a hair pencil to add in the details, for which he is so renowned. For the light, he would touch the area in question with water and then rub it with a piece of bread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wallis

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=578&page=1

Henry Wallis - The carving of Shakespeare's monument in Stratford

A painting by Wallis depicing Gerard Johnson carving Shakespeare's funerary monument. Ben Jonson shows Shakespeare's death mask to the sculptor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wallis

Henry Wallis

[The Stonebreaker] 1858
amazingly rich colours. The same subject was treated by the French Realist Gustave Courbet in 1849 and no doubt influenced Wallis who had done part of his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stonebreaker

[Death of Chatterton] 1856
This picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. Thomas Chatterton was a poet whose 'gothic' writings, melancholy life and youthful suicide fascinated artists and writers of the nineteenth century. At an early age, he wrote fake medieval histories and poems, which he copied onto old parchment and passed off as manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The fraud was later discovered. In London he struggled to earn a living writing tales and songs for popular publications. Penniless, he took his own life by swallowing arsenic at the age of seventeen.

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1830 - 1916.

Born in London his father's name and occupation are unknown. When in 1845 his mother, Mary Anne Thomas, married Andrew Wallis, a prosperous London architect, Henry took his stepfather's surname. His artistic training was thorough and influential. He was admitted as a probationer to the RA and enrolled in the Painting School in March 1848. He also studied in Paris at Gleyre's atelier and at the Academie de Beaux Arts, sometime between 1849 and 1853.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=578&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio